


An Open Letter to Julianna Margulies

by randomizer



Category: Good Wife (TV)
Genre: Kalicia, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-25
Updated: 2013-04-25
Packaged: 2017-12-09 12:15:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/774084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomizer/pseuds/randomizer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On April 24, 2013, Julianna Margulies declared Kalicia dead. This is an attempt at CPR.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Open Letter to Julianna Margulies

_To_ : Julianna Margulies

 _CC_ : Robert King, Michelle King

 _Subject_ : Kalicia  
  
 

Hi, Jules:

I’m sorry to burst in on you like this, but the situation you’ve created is dire. You might not have thought much about what you said in your Chris Harnick [interview](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/julianna-margulies-the-good-wife-season-4-finale_n_3139782.html?1366825903&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008) in the HuffPost, but I have to tell you that it’s not going over well at all in the _Good Wife_ fandom.  It’s not the first time you’ve said something that rankled, but this time, you’re messing with one of the most fascinating friendships between two women ever portrayed on television. This time, you’re telling us that something we love about the show might not exist at all anymore. This time, it’s Kalicia, and it’s personal. 

Just to refresh your memory, here’s what you said in that interview: 

**With Amanda Peet's character Laura Hellinger and Maura Tierney's character Maddie Hayward this season, we saw Alicia forming new friendships outside of the Kalinda relationship that was so central to the show. Alicia's relationship with Kalinda has been rocky and it's kind of taken a backseat. Do you think in Season 5 we'll see them come together again?**

_My guess is not. I think that's kind of played out because of circumstance. I doubt she'll be able to trust that friendship fully. I think Kalinda's character seems to have gone in a different direction. What keeps the show interesting and sort of satisfying is to see other people come into the central character's life to open her up. She needs female friendship, but she needs to start from scratch. She can't be pouring her heart out to someone who once slept with her husband. I mean, it's just not going to happen. It doesn't seem realistic. As much as I think the relationship worked in the beginning because Kalinda is such an independent, sort of suffragette woman -- it helped Alicia to see she didn't need to be a wallflower housewife anymore -- but I think there have been too many twists and turns there. To bring it back would be going backwards instead of moving forward. And there are only so many scenes at a bar you can do. [Laughs.] I do think what it did -- which is fantastic -- is it opened up a world to Alicia where she's going to realize she needs female friendship. In a certain way, having Dallas Roberts' character on the show -- her gay brother -- gave us an inkling, sort of a moment into that. Having Stockard Channing come into her life allows us to sort of see what her life was and how she was raised and why she is the way she is._  

Sigh. Where to begin? With the irony of the “moving forward” mantra in the wake of a back half of a season that has seen the resurrection of the same Alicia/Peter/Will love triangle that kicked off the show four years ago? Or with how much a statement like “there are only so many scenes at a bar you can do” flies in the face of what Robert King said in [an interview a little more than a year ago](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/09/the-good-wife-robert-and-michelle-king-on-alicia-kalinda-renewal-prospects-and-more.html): “We would acknowledge that one of the magical moments in the show up until now, and even seeing the dailies, is seeing these two drink together. If that’s not one of the main relationships of the show, it’s _the_ main relationship of the show”? Or with, for that matter, why you seem to believe that Alicia’s relationship with her gay brother somehow underscores a need for female friendship? 

But no, with none of those. I think I want to start with your apparent idea that Kalinda was some sort of “starter friend” for Alicia, one who is easily replaced by any random guest star who wanders onto the set of _The Good Wife_. Jules, what you’ve never really _gotten_ is the fact that Kalinda was not merely, as you usually put it when you speak of them, Alicia’s _only_ friend.  She was not someone who just happened to work in the same office, someone with whom to share a casual after-work drink now and then. Kalinda was Alicia’s _best_ friend. They had the sort of relationship that Robert King referred to once as “soul mates on the friendship level.”  No matter how many times Alicia beams delightedly at Amanda Peet’s Laura Hellinger, Alicia and Laura can’t begin to touch what Alicia and Kalinda had and still have.  The Alicia/Kalinda chemistry was palpable, and it’s that chemistry to which so many viewers responded early in the show’s run. What we had here were two women so unalike on the surface and so much the same underneath, both intensely private and rarely giving anything away verbally.  They immediately understood each other, communicating everything that needed to be said in glances and raised eyebrows. Each was exactly what the other needed at that particular moment in time: Alicia was Kalinda’s link back to a flicker of real human contact, and Kalinda gave Alicia unqualified support without the pushing and judging that she received from just about everyone else. Throughout the first season and a half of the show, we got to see their relationship grow and strengthen wordlessly before our eyes; it was visual storytelling at its best. Kalicia is the reason why so many of us fell in love with the show in the first place. 

You don’t get this, I know that. So let me help you get there. Let’s try a thought experiment—let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that Kalinda is not just a colleague but actually Alicia’s soul mate. Let’s assume that Kalinda never really intended to befriend Alicia but found herself inexplicably drawn to the other woman.  Let’s further assume that part of the reason was that Kalinda saw herself in Alicia’s pain, in her attempts to reinvent herself as a new, stronger person.  (Remember the great bar scene in “Hybristophilia” in season one, in which Kalinda tells Alicia that “Everything is you. Everything you want to be you, is you”?)  Imagine that none of this was Kalinda’s attempt to mock or deceive; it was genuine affection, of the sort that Kalinda hadn’t felt toward anyone in years. And on Alicia’s side, everything about Kalinda was exactly the supportive, nonjudgmental presence that she was missing in all of her other relationships.  The two of them had a friendship based not on what they said to each other, but on the looks they shared and the things that they did for one another.  That’s what made it so compelling to a lot of us: it was a friendship that was very deep, very complex, and fundamentally different from the Sex-and-the-City female friendships that proliferate the screen. They fit together, they made each other better, and it was magic. 

And somewhere, at another time, in a different life, Kalinda had slept with Alicia’s husband.  When that bomb detonated, anyone who understands narrative knows that it was dropped for one reason, and one reason only: to push this deep relationship further, to make the two characters fight for it and care about it, to move beyond shared looks into actual words, to bring them ultimately closer together. As soon as Alicia threw Kalinda out of her office at the end of season two, the clock for their better, stronger relationship started ticking.  Painful as it was to watch the two of them unravel, we could all be patient because the emotional payoff would ultimately be so magnificent.  Because yes, it might be impossible to forgive a casual friend for betrayal, but a genuine soul mate? That’s a horse of a completely different color--bright orange maybe, or chartreuse. 

Or so one would think—you clearly don’t see it that way.  Oddly, here’s what you have to say about Alicia and Peter:

 _"I thought it was so cut and dry when I started this show, that she should not be with Peter at all after his behavior," Margulies told_ The Huffington Post _in a phone interview earlier in the week. "But then came this moral dilemma: Can one forgive? Can one move on? Is there such a thing as redeeming oneself? It's not a black-and-white case."_  

So let me get this straight—Peter, who knowingly broke vows, who consistently lied to save himself, is worthy of the idea of forgiveness and redemption.  Kalinda, who merely lied to spare Alicia from pain, who never knowingly hurt her and never would, who has sacrificed her professional reputation and her personal happiness for Alicia, is not?  Again, maybe this double standard would make some kind of sense if I thought, as you do, that Kalinda was just an interchangeable friend, easily replaced, whereas Peter at one point had been the man with whom Alicia chose to spend her life. But try to see it through the lens that so many of us use—Kalinda has a unique place in Alicia’s life. With a bond like the one the two of them forged against all odds, forgiveness in the end is not only possible; it’s inevitable. 

We all suspect that some very odd shift occurred in the middle of season four, the details of which are probably known only to you, Robert, and Michelle. But the change was obvious and unsettling.  The first half of the season showed Alicia and Kalinda rebuilding their friendship, with Kalinda’s love for Alicia becoming more and more obvious as her husband Nick tried and failed to figure out exactly who it was that caused Kalinda’s voice to sound so patently “not work” on the phone.  Things weren’t perfect for Kalicia--they still hadn’t really had a conversation about what happened between them. But we know that they’re not talkers, and they were certainly back to doing things to protect each other (which might or might not have included actual murder this time!)  We also were given two gorgeous Kalicia scenes:  the bar scene at the very end of “Battle of the Proxies” (with a [lovely Sunday Girl cover of “Where Is My Mind?](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m--lZP1c28g)” playing as backdrop), and the hotel scene in “Boom De Ya Da,” in which they drank wine and spoke of the painful rift overtly for the first time, a scene Jace Lacob at _The Daily Beast_ aptly called "a pitch-perfect thawing of some very thick ice." (You asked how many times we can see these two characters drinking together?  The answer is, “a lot,” because every time we do worlds of emotional nuance and depth are unleashed.)   

But from 4.12 on, the entire Alicia/Kalinda reconciliation narrative that had been building for a year and a half came to an abrupt, jarring halt. Although ostensibly still friends, the characters were never in the same room together at the same time. We get that the focus isn’t currently on their relationship, but this sudden absence of any interaction at all is bad storytelling.  Here’s a comment that someone left on [Ausiello’s TVLine](http://tvline.com/2013/04/24/the-good-wife-season-5-spoilers-alicia-kalinda/) that I find particularly apt: 

 _Ausiello – Can we please get the Kings take on this in a post-season wrap up??? I beg you. Pretty pretty please. Someone ask them this question! We’ve all been feeling the Alicia/Kalinda back-burner, but this is crazy talk! You create a central relationship for two seasons, make your fans invest in that relationship, tear it down, and then not only refuse to build it back up…but kind of sort of stop addressing it altogether? How much sense does that make? What was the point? Why make us invest in BOTH Alicia and Kalinda’s points of view if the conclusion is simply that a lie/infidelity that any right minded person would think is too big to overcome is in reality too big to overcome? And oh yeah – you knew that already so we’re just going to move on to other things. SAY WHAT?!?!?!_  

“Say what” indeed.  Whatever’s going on in your shop, whoever isn’t getting along with whom (I need to channel Diane here): make it better.  You’re all doing a disservice to the show, and to the viewers who support and love that show.   

Robert and Michelle, we all know that there are some battles worth fighting, and some battles to give up on.  None of us has any idea what sorts of pressures you’re under, or what considerations need to happen to keep the show going at all. And for all we know, you’re turning more and more of your attention to [Girls With Guns](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/showtime-good-wife-michelle-robert-king-girls-with-guns-ridley-scott-366548) and leaving _The Good Wife_ behind.  But I just can’t believe that, because I see the story you're telling, and I know how important Alicia and Kalinda are to that story.  _The Good Wife_ is a show that’s fundamentally about those Chinese walls that we hear so much about in the cases, the barriers that we erect between our private lives and loyalties and our professional responsibilities, between moral idealism and pragmatic necessity. And part of all that—in the center of it, really--is the very basic question about whether, in fact, it’s even _possible_ for adult professionals to have real friendships apart from workplace colleagues and family. Friendship might be everything in childhood through the bubble of college into early adulthood, but the question becomes more complicated later, when loyalties are split between protecting one’s family on the one hand and safeguarding one’s career on the other. Can friendship actually have a place here?  Again and again the show poses dichotomies between doing the “smart” thing and doing the “loyal” thing. And again and again Alicia and Kalinda do things for one another that aren’t “smart,” that give all of us hope that yes, genuine friendship _can_ be possible even in the complicated world that adults traverse. This is a show that continually subverts expectations, but the real subversion is that, underneath everything else, what we have between these two characters is an old fashioned love story, even if it’s one that stays on the level of deep friendship. It’s more than the core relationship on the show, and it’s more than just something that fans enjoy seeing—it’s the glue that holds together all of the most important, interesting questions that the show is asking.  There are some battles worth fighting, and this is one of them. Stick to the story that you’ve been telling since the middle of season one.  Don’t give up on it, or on those of us who love it. 

And Jules, while I have you here, I want to address some comments that you made in the [Emmy roundtable discussions](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/emmys/roundtables/la-roundtable-drama-html,0,7008056.htmlstory) from last summer.  (Click on the third video, the one entitled “A meth dealer, an ad man, and a serial killer walk onto the set.”)  You had a few challenging words to say about fans of the show who spend time writing about your character on the Internet—you wondered who we all were, what kind of jobs we might have, and what our credentials might be.  So allow me to introduce myself.  I’m a woman in my forties, so I’m still just barely in the demographic that CBS and the rest of the networks care about. I have a B.A. from Yale ( _summa cum laude_ ) and a Ph.D. from Princeton. I create reading tests for a living, and I spend a lot of my spare time reading, watching television and movies, and writing about them on various forums on the Internet.  I also write the occasional piece of fan fiction.  That means that the bulk of my professional and personal time is spent reading texts and thinking about them. But none of that speaks to my “credentials.” I’ve met all kinds of people in fandom from many different professions, but what we all have in common is something as old as literature itself: we want to talk with our friends about the stories that are part of the fabric of our lives. That basic desire to make sense of the universe through narrative might well be the defining thing that makes us human beings.  Analyzing Alicia in _The Good Wife_ is no odder than analyzing Elizabeth Darcy in _Pride and Prejudice_ , or The Wife of Bath in _The Canterbury Tales_ , or Penelope in _The Odyssey_.  People have been doing it as long as there have been stories, and they’ll continue to do it until the last lights of humanity have been snuffed out. Our credentials in analyzing your character are the fact that we’re all people, and people are compelled to tell stories to one another. 

You also say in that roundtable video that the showrunners have a responsibility to respect the story that they’ve been telling.  That’s totally true.  We, apparently more than you, understand the story of _The Good Wife,_ and we hope that Robert and Michelle honor the narrative that they’ve begun. For awhile, at least, we’ll be here waiting and hoping.


End file.
